Asia Pacific|Did Airstrikes in Afghanistan Last Week Kill Civilians? U.S. and U.N. Disagree

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Did Airstrikes in Afghanistan Last Week Kill Civilians? U.S. and U.N. Disagree

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Afghans held a protest on Wednesday in the city of Kunduz in response to reports that recent American airstrikes in Kunduz Province caused civilian casualties. The American military insisted that only Taliban fighters were killed or wounded.CreditCreditNajim Raheem/European Pressphoto Agency

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Mohammad Anas, a college student, sheltered with friends and relatives in a mosque as they listened, terrified, to the boom of American airstrikes pummeling Taliban positions near their village in northern Afghanistan on Nov. 3.

When the bombing subsided the next morning, the villagers came out and tried to return home, but Taliban insurgents ordered them to begin recovering the bodies of slain fighters.

Before they finished, Mr. Anas said, warplanes returned and bombed the group. When it was over, village elders say, 19 civilians were left dead and at least six others were wounded — including Mr. Anas, whose wounds were minor.

“Three of my friends were dead,” he said.

The United Nations confirmed the broad outlines of Mr. Anas’s account, saying at least 10 civilians were killed in airstrikes on Nov. 4 in Kunduz Province. But the American military in Afghanistan insists that the only dead or wounded were Taliban insurgents.

It was at least the fourth time in the past two years that airstrikes in the hotly contested area have led to controversy over whether civilians were killed.

For the residents of the village, Qatl-e Aam in the Chardara District, the episode has bitter irony.

In 1985, Soviet troops killed 650 residents, leaving only a handful alive. Residents renamed the village Qatl-e Aam, which means “massacre” in Dari.

“There were so many bodies we turned the whole village into a cemetery,” one survivor of the 1985 violence, Ghulam Nabi, 80, recalled.

Another survivor of that massacre was Faiz Mohammad, 53, who said he lost his 13-year-old son in last week’s airstrikes. “He had just finished learning the Holy Quran by heart,” Mr. Mohammad said.

But the next day, Wednesday, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan took the unusual step of issuing a series of four posts on Twitter saying that its own investigation found that at least 10 civilians had been killed.

“Accounts indicate victims were civilians forced by AGE’s to retrieve bodies from earlier fighting,” the mission said on Twitter, referring to antigovernment elements, which in Kunduz usually means Taliban insurgents.

The United Nations’ account was similar to what a New York Times reporter in the area was told during interviews this week with local villagers from the vicinity around Qatl-e Aam. “The Taliban forced everyone in the morning to retrieve their bodies,” said one villager, Hajji Mahmoud, 69, who said he was wounded in the head and arm.

In a statement, the United States military said that “numerous enemy combatants were killed,” adding that its account was supported by the governor of Kunduz, Asadullah Omarkhel, and a Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Dawlat Waziri.

But less senior officials in the area gave divergent accounts. Nimatullah Timory, head of public awareness in Governor Omarkhel’s office, said that one civilian was killed and five civilians were wounded, although he added that the death occurred when the civilian tried to remove the body of a wounded Uzbek insurgent to hide evidence of foreign fighters’ working with the Taliban.

The American military claimed that particularly telling was its finding that “no hospitals or clinics in the local area indicated treatment of people with wounds from armed conflict.” But a Times reporter saw six wounded patients in the Kunduz Regional Hospital on Nov. 4 who said they were victims of the airstrikes.

Mr. Anas, the student, was among a group of 70 villagers who came to the city of Kunduz, the capital of the province, to protest outside the governor’s house on Wednesday. He displayed photographs on his cellphone that he said showed children who were victims. “The governor is sitting in his office and doesn’t know what is the real story,” he said. Elders from the village presented the governor with a list of 19 civilians they claimed had been killed, all men except for two children.

Asked about the divergent accounts, Liam McDowall, director of strategic communications for the United Nations mission, said, “The U.N. has over the past decade proved itself to be the most credible and reliable source for information about the devastating impact of the conflict on civilians in Afghanistan.”

“The U.N. in Afghanistan is, given its unsparing focus on safeguarding the lives of Afghan civilians, subject to regular criticism from all parties to the conflict,” Mr. McDowall added. “There is rarely an incident or a day when our work to protect lives through our impartial reporting is not challenged.”

He declined to elaborate.

An American military spokesman, Capt. Thomas R. Gresback of the Navy, said, “If there is additional credible evidence out there, we’re open to hearing about it, but to date no one has come forward with anything.”

Airstrikes in Kunduz have been particularly numerous, with three earlier serious claims that they resulted in civilian casualties just in the past two years.

Those three earlier claims of civilian casualties came from airstrikes during the Obama administration.

The most serious was an attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in the city of Kunduz on Oct. 3, 2015, which killed 42 civilians, most of them patients and staff members in the hospital. After a lengthy investigation, the American military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., apologized, blaming human error, and 16 soldiers, one of them a special operations general, were disciplined.

In June 2016, also in the Chardara District where the airstrikes last Saturday occurred, Afghan officials and local residents claimed that American airstrikes on a Taliban prison killed 7 to 16 prisoners.

Last November, 33 civilians and two American soldiers were killed on the outskirts of the city of Kunduz, including many women and children. After a lengthy investigation, the American military admitted in January that 33 civilians had been killed but said that the Taliban had used civilian homes as cover.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: American Airstrikes in Afghanistan Stir Debate Over Who Was Killed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe